A big focus of marketers is on the creation of blogs as part of a wider content marketing strategy & approach. There is a lot of blogging going on – the consensus seems to be something like 2-3 million blog posts published every day. Admittedly it would appear that corporate blogging makes up the smallest category while the majority of blogs are written by individuals for a variety of reasons ranging from vanity to a desire to help others.
Even a small percentage of 2-3 million is a significant number of corporate blogs being written, so why are we all focused so much on blogs and blogging – and is this effort worth it.
Corporate blogging was touted as a way to keep website content fresh (as that is what mattered to Google) with little effort, as a short blog could be posted quickly and always offer up to date information.
This is a simple enough concept that you would have thought would be universally understood, but many got it wrong and so now think that blogging does not work.
There are many experts out there that will give you tips on how to get a wide audience or the best words to use, or avoid, in titles, but here I am talking about more basic problems, which shamefully, came from an SEO company that approached me and who said that blogs were a major factor in SEO (now they are just one in many factors). Here are some of their howlers:
- Not calling a blog or blog. In the examples they showed me, the blogs were called articles. They were too short to even be a blog let alone an article.
- Stick to a rigid timetable. It is good to aim for regular blogs, but only when you have something to say. They said they would do 5 a month, every month. This type of approach guarantees you will run out of things to say and end up publishing content-free guff.
- Publish at the same time. Horrifically, in the example they showed me all 5 ‘articles’ were published on the same day & time (something like 3:28 on a Tuesday). Nothing screams fake than this. Blogs should appear when they are written. If they appear at irregular intervals, it gives them a more authentic tone of voice.
There is one other howler that seriously impacts the usefulness of blogging and companies do not need any help from dodgy SEO consultants to be guilty of it. I am talking about over complicating the process.
Blogs are meant to be immediate, relevant and timely. Ideally you should publish regularly – especially if they are part of a wider content marketing strategy – and often. Blogs should be the work of one person, not a committee.
But what do we see happening in many organisations? The mindset in many companies – especially the more traditional ones – means that blogs are treated as a major undertaking. As with all such undertakings an approval process is created and days & weeks are wasted as people feel the need to edit.
A blog is not a major piece of business collateral with a long shelf life. It is the exact opposite and should not be bogged down in process. Here are some quick tips for effective blogging: ·
- Identify a group of people that can be trusted to produce blogs on their own·
- Make it clear they can be short and will not take up too much time·
- If this is too difficult for them, make it easy. Get them to write bullet points and then use a marketing or writing resource to polish it into sentences·
- Try not to spend more than an hour or so writing them·
- Give to someone to proof read (and not edit).
- Just put it up – if there are problems they can be quickly fixed.
- Promote via social media.
- Use Blogs to create a team of subject matter experts that can help build corporate credibility, so publish them under their own name. Blogs written by “the marketing team” will lose credibility.
- Don’t make them too detailed – you may be able to milk the same subject for multiple blogs.
- Don’t be afraid to republish and promote existing blogs. Your newest followers will have missed them.
- Blogs should not be the sum total of your content and communication strategy. They will not win business on their own but will add to the collective amount of content that help you communicate with your customers and prospects.
These are not definitive tips to be the greatest bloggers ever but should help people establish the rhythm of a successful blogging engine. Over time you will see what subjects are popular and what are the best ways that people find your blogs. You will get better at writing them and coming up with attention-grabbing titles.
Time for a final warning: There are many tools out there that promise to help you write better content for SEO but be careful how you use them. Don’t slavishly follow their recommendations, because they could stifle the human voice that should be at the heart of every blog.
